Finalist: The Virtual Microscope

Understanding the structural changes that diseases produce in tissues and organs is a critical step in the education of future physicians, dentists and medical researchers. Traditionally, students acquire this knowledge by studying surgical specimens and tissue sections under a microscope in the Pathology Laboratory. But often the samples are available only during laboratory periods or for limited times at the library. Outside of those times, students must rely on their notes, drawings and memories, which aren’t always accurate. With hundreds of high resolution, true color microscopic images online, the Virtual Microscope allows students to study samples 24 hours a day. Just as they would in the lab, users can scan a sample at low magnification; then enlarge any part of the image two- to four-fold without losing detail. Interactive questions and answers allow students to check their knowledge as they review course material. U-M students enrolled in pathology courses aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit—students in other courses and on other campuses, licensed physicians who want a refresher and anyone who’s curious can use the Web sites.

Laureates

CoLABnet

Science is an increasingly collaborative endeavor. But the way the subject is taught in most lab courses—with students working individually or in pairs, all doing identical exercises and trying to get the “right” results—doesn’t reflect the way it’s done in the real world, where scientists work together on problems for which the outcome is not known in advance. In addition, students in lab classes often spend most of their time collecting and organizing data with little time left to consider what it all means. The coLABnet (collaborative laboratories through networked computers) project redesigned a first-year college chemistry course to give students a more realistic feel for how science is done. Students work in teams, with each team using different samples and/or conditions. CoLABnet software collects, pools and summarizes qualitative and quantitative data from teams in all sections of the course into a “class data bank,” which may be automatically dumped into a graphing software package. This frees students from mundane clerical tasks and gives them time to think about, manipulate and discuss the data.

The extensive data bank and the way it is displayed allows students to make predictions about untested samples, to answer “what-if” questions and to explore relationships among variables. Comparisons of students in the redesigned labs with students in traditional labs show that those using coLABnet interact more with classmates, spend more time discussing data and concepts and are better at extracting general principles from their lab experience. In response to questionnaires, the students themselves say that the course, as taught with coLABnet, is helping them develop higher level cognitive skills, such as the ability to interpret and extrapolate from data.

CyberFly

Generations of biology students have experimented with fruit flies, crossing and backcrossing the flies to pin down the genetic basis of particular mutations. And generations of biology students have become frustrated when their flies developed too slowly, produced too few offspring or died halfway through the six-week experiment, leaving them with no results. With CyberFly, students go through all the steps of genetic analysis in a week or two, without the frustrations. To get lab experience, students still perform the first set of crosses on real flies. After that, they do additional crosses on the computer, selecting realistic-looking flies that were created by scanning in slides of fruit flies taken through a dissecting microscope. The images were digitally manipulated to create mutants with different eye colors or wing shapes. Unlike some commercially available genetics simulations, CyberFly doesn’t simplify the experiment or coach students on correct answers. They do the work and analyze their results just as they would in the lab, getting a feel for what it’s like to do scientific work, but not getting mired in details.

Internet-based Educational Program on Scientific Literature Evaluation Skills

The abundance of health information on the Internet, on television and in magazines and newspapers sometimes makes it hard to separate scientific fact from hype or pure fiction. Pharmacists, with their experience and knowledge of scientific studies, can play an important role in helping the public get the facts straight. Learning how to tell good studies from ones that are poorly designed or that misinterpret the results is therefore an important part of a pharmacist’s education. For more than 30 years, the U-M College of Pharmacy has offered a course that teaches these skills. Students in the course read published articles that describe clinical drug trials; then meet regularly to discuss them. They also learn a stepwise approach to evaluating scientific articles.

Recently, the College revised the course to include a Web-based component. The articles that students are assigned to read are posted on the course Web site. But instead of just reading the articles before class, students are required to answer, via the Web site, a set of questions that follow the stepwise approach. The result: students come to class better prepared to discuss the articles. The instructor can also check students’ answers before class to find out where they are confused. “Model” answers are subsequently posted on the Web site for students to refer to while working on the next assignment or studying for the course exam. Eventually, the site will include hyperlinks to an online version of the course textbook and additional reference material, a forum where users at different locations can meet to discuss articles and an audiovisual component with a group of experts discussing clinical implications of the studies described in particular articles.

The Michigan Applied Pharmacokinetics Computer Assisted Learning Modules

With new medicines constantly coming on the market, it’s more essential than ever that pharmacists understand what happens as drugs pass through the body. Professional pharmacy students, who ultimately will work in hospitals, retail pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies, learn about this in pharmacokinetics courses. Pharmacokinetics explores such topics as how long a drug is active in the body, what dose a patient should receive, how the drug should be administered and how the body eliminates the drug. Many of these concepts are difficult to understand when explained with only words or mathematical equations.

The Michigan Applied Pharmacokinetics Computer Assisted Learning Modules use interactive graphical models and animated illustrations to help get the ideas across. For example, animations show how drugs are transported across membranes. Simulations of the liver, kidney and blood allow students to change various conditions and see how drug levels fluctuate. Visual models, rather than conventional graphs, are used to illustrate mathematical relationships. In one example, the volume of water in a graduated cylinder, representing drug distribution in the body, rises and falls as students change the amount of unbound drug in the system. The modules are posted online, making them available to students and practicing pharmacists any time.

M-Pathways

With 19 schools and colleges, a medical center and three campuses, the University of Michigan has a complex structure and culture. Over the years, its various entities have developed their own administrative systems and procedures, leading to inefficiencies as the University has grown. For example, students have had to visit five or six offices just to change their address. The goal of the M-Pathways Project is to streamline administrative processes and facilitate the sharing of information throughout the University, while preserving the autonomy of its separate communities. Part of the solution is to use common software to set up university-wide databases. But realizing that software is not enough, the M-Pathways team is also creating a new organizational structure to make sure the system meets the needs of students, faculty and staff.

New Genre Media Initiative in Art and Design

Sherri Smith, Interim Dean and Professor, School of Art and Design

Thanks to a partnership between the U-M School of Art and Design and the Information Technology Division, students and faculty are now using computers and other technology to help design and produce jewelry, sculpture, furniture, fiber art and other works. The technologies allow the artists to explore three-dimensional design in ways that previously were difficult and time-consuming, if not impossible. A jewelry maker, for example, can reshape a virtual version of an object many times before using real materials. Mixed media artists use the precision of laser modeling technology, and electronic media artists teach students to use sensing devices—previously limited to the realm of engineering—to make interactive artworks. The collaboration also has led to new ways of using technology to teach art and design.

Phonetics: Sounds of English

Learning to pronounce English words properly is a tedious and often frustrating process for non-native speakers. Even after years of effort, some never get the sounds quite right. In addition to hearing spoken English, most learners need additional guidance on precisely how to position the tongue and lips to make the sounds correctly. This approach requires one-on-one attention from an instructor and the use of still pictures and technical terms that often leave many students confused. Sounds of English offers a more effective and accessible teaching method. X-ray movie clips, videos and animated cartoons of the vocal tract show students exactly how the lips and tongue move to make each sound. Instead of getting the information only once—in a classroom demonstration—students can access it any time, from campus computing sites or their own computers. The program also uses game-like activities to enliven the learning process. Its creators plan to expand into other languages and to develop simpler versions for children.

Project STaR

Through a series of Internet gateways, Project STaR’s Web site links the resources of academia to those of the American Jewish community. The STaRGate section of the site was designed by students in a course on “Jewish Communal Services in the US and Abroad.” The students were responsible for collecting and creating links to Web sites relevant to social service programs in Jewish communities, determining criteria for including sites and deciding how to describe them. The resulting resource provides access to information on Jewish communities and organizations, culture and religion, learning resources and history.

The SLATE (Space for Learning and Teaching Exploration) project

SLATE, a multimedia collection of materials, is designed as a learning tool for beginning and experienced teachers. The heart of the collection is a set of 27 digitized video clips of third-grade class sessions, each about 30 minutes long. Also included are transcripts of the videos, examples of children’s written work, teachers’ logs and written reflections and other artifacts gathered from the classroom. This collection of materials in digital form provides teachers with learning opportunities that formal coursework and even firsthand experience in schools cannot offer. In a real classroom, for example, observers can’t interrupt to ask questions about teaching techniques or kids’ progress. But SLATE makes it possible to stop video clips at any time for discussion or analysis and to perform keyword searches of video transcripts. SLATE’s capacity for speed and searching makes it easy for prospective teachers to track students’ performance and interaction over time, study the unfolding of the curriculum across the year or analyze the development of classroom norms and routines.

Technology Assisted Teacher Education (TATE) Project

Science and math teachers routinely use technology in their teaching, but educators in the humanities have lagged behind. The TATE project shows how interactive video, Internet resources, e-mail and other technologies can be incorporated into teacher education and professional development. The project links three groups who previously had few opportunities to share their knowledge: secondary school teachers of English; graduate students preparing to teach college literature courses; and undergraduates preparing to teach at the secondary level. Using two-way video, experienced teachers have shared with prospective teachers what they teach as well as how they teach it. A teacher in Southfield, Mich., for example, “invites” prospective teachers into her classroom to see how she conducts a reading-writing workshop. Teachers in California offered a virtual tour of Angel Island—where Asian immigrants once were held before entering the United States—and used the tour to explain how their geographic location influences the way they teach Fae Myenne Ng’s novel, Bone, which portrays life in San Francisco’s Chinatown. TATE also steers teachers to Web-based collections of documents and photographs, such as those of the U-M’s Bentley Historical Library, which can be used to provide context to discussions of literature.

UAW-Ford University

Lawrence Root, Professor, School of Social Work, and Director, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations

The 1996 collective bargaining agreement between the United Auto Workers and Ford Motor Company called for a new, university-style approach to workplace education and training. UAW-Ford University is the first step toward this objective. Working together, the UAW-Ford National Programs Center, the School of Social Work, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, and the U-M-Dearborn developed a new program to bring classes directly to the auto plants and to individual workers. Faculty of the U-M-Dearborn’s College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters created a customized undergraduate liberal arts degree program in “Work, Technology and Society” specifically oriented to the auto industry. The first courses were offered in the fall of 1997 on a pilot basis in three auto plants, delivered via the Internet, CD-ROM and video-conferencing. This pilot program has since been expanded to include seven additional plants.

UM.CourseTools

The information technology explosion has been both a blessing and a curse for university faculty. They have many more tools for teaching, communication and collaboration, but they also must devote more time to learning which tools to use and how to use them. UM.CourseTools is designed to relieve them of the burden of cobbling together their own Web-based course materials. It consists of a Web-based tool kit that faculty can easily customize to fit their needs. Included in the kit are scheduling, assignment and evaluation tools, grading and feedback mechanisms, Web-based announcements, threaded discussion spaces, online course materials and other resources. Additional tools to permit real-time collaboration will be added. While its main use has been in traditionally taught on-campus courses, UM.CourseTools has also had an impact on distance education programs at the U-M Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses. An extensive pilot in Fall 1999 will be followed by general availability within the next year.

UM.Lessons

Contacts: Roger Espinosa and Regan Knapp, Instructional Software Developers, Media Union

UM.Lessons is an online tool that helps instructors create Web-based quizzes and review lessons. Most of the time, instructors have similar needs where quizzes are concerned: the ability to shuffle question order, to schedule when lessons are available and to gather data to see how well a class performed on a given test. UM.Lessons fills these needs, and also provides students with helpful feedback. Most question types are designed to let students know not only which answer is correct but also why it’s right and why the other choices are not. UM.Lessons has been available since Fall 1998, and faculty have found a variety of ways to use it. The German Department has incoming students take online grammar and listening comprehension quizzes; the results are immediately available and can be used right away in placement counseling. The College of Pharmacy uses short, online quizzes to gauge how well students understand course material throughout the term.

Back to Computerworld Smithsonian ceremony recognizes projects

M-PathwaysSherri SmithInformation Technology DivisionProject STaRSpace for Learning and Teaching Exploration